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185 chapter four Politics & Paysans MULTICULTURAL LOUISIANA & THE SPACE OF THE CRÉOLITÉ i. mutable geographies The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and knaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. —michel foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1986) Any space occupied by people of African descent in the United States is contested. Escape to other places inevitably becomes marred by the floating signifiers of U.S. racial-spatial ideology, as Richard Wright discovered in the mid-twentieth century. Retracing Wright’s footsteps, Shay Youngblood mapped the problematic of spaces outside the United States for people of the African diaspora. By the end of the twentieth century, Youngblood’s Paris had changed over time and was at once the place of Richard Wright’s expatriate refuge and the place of bombings that linked it to Birmingham and another rights struggle by people of color. History repeats in the clashes and the narratives of contested space; however , the stories across time and space are not precisely the same. They repeat differently as landscapes and as bodies, and with, Youngblood suggested, the burdens of desire and need circulating through the construction of the two. In Black Girl in Paris, Eden, the narrator from the American South, understands desire and need as place-specific but attenuated as Creole space and disaporic body. Along with Ving, Louisiana-born musician, and Luce, mixed-race Bar- POLITICS & PAYSANS|186| badian cosmopolitan, Eden flows between spaces and through histories in an effort to create anew. Success is not assured. The very identification of black people with geographical space results in a transformation to “raced” space with all of the intact markers of racism. Within the regulatory boundaries of raced space, black people experience both containment in narrow spatial parameters and exclusion from larger social practices. This practice, termed the spacialization of race, isolates blacks within structures of disorder, decay, and crime, most often identified simply as “the ghetto.”1 This “racial geography” results from practices of power and of privilege inscribed in law and custom, but which historically and socially have mandated a one-dimensional narrative of U.S. space and black bodies within that geographical configuration.2 The struggle blacks then face is not merely to transgress the fixed boundaries and the resultant social conditions but also to construct the subjective ground that is heterogeneous, fluid, and counterhegemonic.3 Fluidity and heterogeneity especially become the measures of potential success to which raced writers who constituted new spaces out of their “experience” of Mississippi might attest. Houston Baker observes, “all fixed points are problematical”: “Fixity is a function of power. Those who maintain place, who decide what takes place and dictate what has taken place, are power brokers of the traditional. The ‘placeless,’ by contrast, are translators of the nontraditional. Rather than fixed in the order of cunning Grecian urns, their lineage is fluid, nomadic, transitional.”4 Nowhere has the struggle of African Americans against fixity been more visible or vicious than in the U.S. South. Baker’s observation of the “fluid, nomadic, transitional” is central to my thinking about the movement of blacks in the American South, both in temporal and spatial terms. For example , especially immediately following emancipation, black bodies flowed into freedom by searching, often futilely, to reconnect severed families and to establish places of becoming new; or during the Great Migration, when the outward flow from the South launched an often nomadic search for jobs, opportunity, and safety. This chapter takes up the promise and the failure of Louisiana as an alternative space for modeling a more expansive and less binary construction of race within the United States from the nineteenth century onward, a construction that would acknowledge the fluidity of racial designations and of raced bodies without necessarily resorting to nomadism in terms of location or periodicity in terms of time. It considers the multiracial and multilingual Creoles, Louisiana people of color and their cultural production , as a lost opportunity for developing not only...

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